American Thinker:

Can He Be Stopped?

By David Solway

The single most important question for Americans today is as simple as it is inescapable: Is it possible to block and reverse Barack Obama’s fundamental transformation of American society to resemble a soft-power, European socialist state (or worse) before the damage he does to his country is irreparable? Waiting until 2012 when his first term is completed may bring, in a different domain and with certain obvious adjustments, something like the catastrophic results which the film 2012 [1], based on the prognostications of the Mayan Long Count Calendar [2], lividly portrays. For the smug and incompetent leadership of an enigmatic president is starting “progressively” to look like a bad movie with real-world effects. And 2012, at least according to the dread Calendar, is the year when everything goes to pieces.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that Obama began his political career more as an effect, or the symptom of a malaise, than as a cause or the malaise itself. After all, the American people put him where he is, intuiting in Obama an embodiment of their own regrettably facile and unexamined aspirations and an untutored drive to renovate the past. But the effect has now been transformed into a cause in its own right and the symptom has become the infirmity. Consequently, many of those who ensured Obama’s accession to power are presently experiencing a severe case of elector’s remorse.

For there can be little doubt any longer that the United States is now governed by a rogue administration, founded not on the Constitution but on lies, one broken campaign promise after another and attempts to ignore or scamper around the principles of the Fathers. We are observing an establishment that is unwilling to defend the nation’s borders from drug cartel violence and illegal immigration, forcing unread bills through Congress in the dark of night, embarking on a socialized medicine program it cannot afford and which has not worked wherever else it has been tried, plunging the nation into bankruptcy with misnamed “stimulus spending,” unsustainable entitlements and exponential debt, refusing to drill safely on land to reduce its dependence on foreign oil supplies, utterly incapable of dealing with cataclysms like the Gulf oil spill, touting an impractical, premature and ruinously exorbitant Green Energy policy, considering cap-and-trade legislation when it has become undeniably clear that Global Warming research is a profoundly unsettled and perhaps even a false science, scrubbing all reference to Islamic terror from its official documents and pursuing a foreign policy that might accurately be described as geopolitically suicidal. Quite a list, but unfortunately an accurate one.

This is an administration that could just as well have been put in place by America’s most relentless enemies. It is headed by a president with deep roots in a neo-Marxist social movement and associational ties with a host of disreputable characters. This is a president who has embarked on a diplomatic approach of appeasing the country’s despotic competitors and adversaries, with whom he appears to have more in common than with the majority of his own countrymen. Accompanied by his friends, officials, cabinet choices and hand-picked adjutants (aka “czars”), he appears intent on circumventing the rule of law on the one hand—whether considering amnesty for illegal aliens or refusing to prosecute electoral violators like the Black Panthers, guilty of voter intimidation—and on the other hand activating civil law where it does not apply, as in moving to grant civil trials to confessed jihadists or according Miranda rights to captured terrorists.


The most significant issue for Americans today, then, or at any rate for those who profess to love their country and who fear for its future, is how to stymie the current president prior to 2012. Obama is plainly a hyperactive president, busy dismantling his country with systematic rigor. Since it is evident that he will persist in implementing his congenial plan of action, it is moot whether a strong, confident and potentially solvent America can survive another two and a half years of his dispensation without serious modification. The Tea Party movement is an impressive beginning, and the likelihood of evacuating many Democratic incumbents in the November 2010 Congressional and Senate elections—essentially to clean up what may be called the House of Misrepresentatives and restore it to a semblance of sanity and rectitude—is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

It is all well and good to complain and lament about what is going on in this administration, the misuse of power, the immorality and intellectual vandalism of its wielders, the momentum of waste and ruin—but at some point concrete measures need to be taken to forestall breakdown and collapse. Nor does one want to contemplate the disaster of an Obama re-election in 2012, which might well realize the mythic predictions of the Mayan Calendar and a sensationalist film, in any event for the U.S. But the calamity need not wait for that red-letter date; it is evolving in increments as we speak. This is why the coming November is so important: it may not only reclaim lost ground but notably weaken Obama’s chances of success in seeking a second term.

Barring Obama and his party’s electoral chastening in 2010, by the time 2012 arrives, what we will very likely see is the following: more socialized, i.e., nationalized industries and bloated entitlement programs; a grinding recession, if not a depression, and traumatic levels of unemployment for which Obama can no longer blame the previous administration and expect to get away with it; twelve to fifteen million enfranchised illegals swelling the welfare and voting rolls; a growing and increasingly bitter racial divide; more terrorist attacks; deep Islamic inroads into the body politic; public resentment reaching critical proportions and more states acting on their own initiative; and former allies moving into the orbit of America’s enemies. We may also see a devastating war in the Middle East which might have been prevented had Obama not skewed the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process and extended overtures to Syria and Hamas, had he shown himself genuinely sympathetic to Israel and its legitimate concerns, and had he decisively confronted the Iranian regime. Again, quite a list, which may sound like an overly melodramatic prognosis, but it is a grimly plausible one nonetheless and no particular epiphany. Indeed, it would seem a given under the prevailing circumstances. And the United States will suffer in every instance.




Let us not delude ourselves and pretend that the scenario plotted here is merely a species of exotic hyperbole, a doomsayer’s extravaganza. America is disintegrating fragment by fragment across the entire map of its existence, and the decline is accelerating under the worst possible president at the worst possible time. Its enemies are rejoicing and growing ever bolder in their calculations, convinced that they can challenge residual American power with relative impunity. Meanwhile, the American leadership, following the example of the president, has persuaded itself that political ineptness and blind arrogance are nothing of the sort, but farsighted acuity and strategic intelligence. On the contrary, there is not an iota of analytical sobriety to be detected anywhere on the presidential docket.

It should be mentioned, however, that some observers believe the president’s actions are by no means as clueless as they appear but are quite deliberate, that he is actually intent on subverting the nation to render it more amenable to a statist power grab and increased government control. This is the Overton Window [3] syndrome that Glenn Beck has based his new novel [4] upon, a tactic that promotes national crises and invokes maximal states of emergency to prepare the public to accept extreme procedures and enactments, and so to concede subsequent changes in customary cultural paradigms, in the interests of centralized authority. The Overton Window is a manifestation and restatement of the famous, or infamous, Alinsky-inspired Cloward-Piven doctrine [5] that recommends orchestrating crises to further the ulterior purpose of the state, or in the words of James Simpson [6], it is a “malevolent overarching strategy” envisaging the collapse of the staple political and economic order and its replacement by a socialist regime.

Whether or not this is the case—and who can really say?—the fact remains that the United States, to quote [7] Pajamas Media Chicago editor Rick Moran, is becoming “unmoored…from the basic principles found in the Constitution that defines our nationhood.” And when the definition of nationhood grows problematic and the sense of historical continuity is disrupted or attenuated, the scourge of communal erosion invariably sets in. This condition is materially advanced by honoring what is deceitfully called the “Living Constitution [8]” rather than the original document hospitable to amendments. For the Living Constitution is a dead letter.

Perhaps what we are ultimately witnessing is a historical narrative whose denouement is inevitable in the natural course of events. Perhaps America’s time has come, now that it has installed a president and a party with a destructive agenda and the desire to push it through at all costs, even as the world is in its most volatile state since the 1930s and America’s enemies gather strength by the day. It doesn’t help either that this president, whatever his intentions are, happens to be intellectually frivolous and self-enamored, relying on an ingratiating smile and a supplicant media to work his will upon a partisan or credulous public. The air of supercilious folly is pervasive. Perhaps this is the way an empire ends, not with a bang but a simper.

And yet, the desolate verdict of history may still be delayed and a not-unhappy ending to the current drama come to pass, should the American people rouse itself from its torpor, find a way to purge itself of its parasitical and treasonable elements before it is too late, and unite around the inherent virtues of the country: a noble Constitution, legitimate pride in accomplishment, a potent military which functions as it is supposed to, entrepreneurial and innovative vigor, sensible economic policies, melting-pot immigration as opposed to multicultural infiltration, Emersonian self-reliance [9] and, most crucially, limited government. Once again, quite a list, but a beneficial one, expressing the real meaning of “hope and change.”

2010 is the place to start. Only then may the inevitable be deferred, a movie remain a movie and the mythic timetable prevented from entering the realm of national history. Only then may 2012 avoid the upheavals of 2012.